Мария Степанова - In Memory of Memory

Well. There we are, Natasha. Dearest mother to my very first granddaughter.

5.

A draft of a letter from Grandfather to his own sister. It is undated but I think it is from 1984 or even 1985, when Grandfather was fast losing his memory and becoming sadder and more remote.

Moscow. Sunday the 16th.

I send my greetings and best wishes to you, Masha, my dear sister! How are you? How are you getting along? How’s your health been? And — once a teacher, always a teacher — I want to know how your pupils are getting along and what successes you’ve had with them. What classes are you taking in school? How many teachers are there in the school and what have they done in the past? Are there any you can fully rely on in school as well as in life? Does the school have its own party organization or are your communist teachers registered elsewhere? Who is running the school: a nonparty-affiliated person or a communist and what sort of relationship have you got with that person in school and outside school? I’m full of shame that I haven’t seen you for so long, and I can hardly imagine you alive, and working hard. As a teacher and school leader of old I’m interested in the conflicts and where they come from. And one last question: is everyone friendly toward each other? Do you work a single or a double shift? Oh yes! I meant to ask how many teachers there are, and whether there are more men or more women. And the main question: how does everyone get on? Do they get on with each other? And with the school leadership?

And my last question is to you personally. Why haven’t you written to your brother since the beginning of the school year? I thought long and hard about that and couldn’t find an answer. Surely after the death of our mother you had someone you could write to in the immediate family. Surely you didn’t suspect us all

When you start sorting through the things and concepts of the past you can tell instantly which are still wearable, like old clothes, and which have shrunk, faded, like a jumper that’s been through the wrong wash. Those yellowing suede gloves, like plate armor in a museum, look as if they belong to a schoolgirl or a doll. They seem to belong with certain intonations, certain opinions; they’re smaller than we imagine humans to be — if you look at them through the wrong end of the telescope, they have an ant-like precision; yet they are very far away. Sebald describes an empty house with its dusty carpets, a stuffed polar bear, and “golf clubs, billiard cues, and tennis rackets, most of them so small they might have been intended for children, or have shrunk in the course of the years…” Sometimes everything in the past (untranslatable, unusable, barely meeting today’s needs) seems child-sized, to be treated with the fond condescension of those who have left childhood behind. The simplicity and naivety of the past is habitually overstated, and this has gone on for centuries.

The once-acclaimed novel Trilby graced my parents’ shelves like a living presence, its spine still hard, the golden letters gleaming. The Russian edition was published in some haste in 1896, by then George du Maurier’s tale had been published in America and Britain in unprecedented print runs of hundreds of thousands of copies. The only picture in the Russian edition was on the cover, a tall woman in an infantryman’s greatcoat, caught around the waist by a belt, standing determined on a small rise, bare white legs, one hand held out, holding a cigarette, her hair loose on her shoulders. Despite all this she resembles nothing more than a milkmaid. She has a purposeful straightforward air, as if to quash any ideas of silliness, and this impression is borne out when you read the book.

The story of Trilby follows an artist’s model, posing “for the altogether” in Parisian art studios. She makes friends with some jolly English artists whose odd habits include daily ablutions in hip baths, then falls in love with one of them but gives him up, convinced he is destined for a better woman. All of this is very sweet, especially the heroine with her wide-eyed loving-kindness and her tuneless singing. The softhearted Trilby suffers from neuralgia and the only person who can help her is a man named Svengali, a rogue, a hypnotizer, a great musician, and a dirty Jew. Dirty in the most literal sense — the cleanliness of others merely makes him laugh uncontrollably. He has bony fingers and a “long, thick, shapely Hebrew nose”; “he would either fawn or bully, and could be grossly impertinent.”

At the beginning of the twentieth century the “Svengali” became a phenomenon in and of itself: not the name of a literary hero but a term to describe someone exerting a mysterious force on others. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary dryly defines a “Svengali” as a person who “manipulates or exerts excessive control over another.” The Oxford English Dictionary adds the words “mesmeric” and “for some sinister purpose.” The inexplicable ability to control another, to turn that person on and off like a desk lamp according to your will, so intrigued readers that the story, rather than falling into obscurity, lived on in a whole series of screen versions. Most of these were no longer named after the novel: from the end of the 1920s the novel became indistinguishable from the magnetic “Svengali, Svengali, Svengali.”

Neither author nor reader would have had cause to reflect much on this matter-of-course anti-Semitism. It was as natural as birdsong; simply another feature of Du Maurier’s book, as much as the constant jokes at the expense of the Germans or the discussions of women’s beauty (a “deformed” woman, a “squinting dwarf” will only “inflict on his descendants a wrong that nothing will ever redeem”). But the difference is that, unlike all the prejudices expressed en passant, the Jewishness of Svengali seems to fascinate the narrator. He returns again and again to the theme, picking through a fairly standard selection of descriptives: greasy hair, bold and brilliant eyes, a comic aspect, a cruel sense of humor, physical and moral uncleanliness. And there is his great talent, which for a time even allays the disgust of the hearty, hygienic heroes with their drooping whiskers: “There was nothing so humble, so base even, but that his magic could transform it into the rarest beauty without altering a note. This seems impossible, I know. But if it didn’t, where would the magic come in?”

Du Maurier’s Trilby is entertaining and good-natured, uniting both author and reader in a rare feeling of satisfaction, even self-satisfaction: “and they would try and express themselves to the effect that life was uncommonly well worth living in that particular city at that particular time of the day and year and century, at that particular epoch of their own mortal and uncertain lives.” The action of the novel takes place toward the end of the 1850s, and everything is retrospectively gilded with the spirit of the Belle Époque: the three Baudelairean flaneurs taking their strolls down the “crowded, well-lighted boulevards, and a bock at the café there, at a little three-legged marble table right out on the genial asphalt pavement”; and enjoying more traditional amusements, like donkey rides and hide-and-seek in the Bois de Boulogne. The suspension springs of progress are well-oiled: these children of civilization laugh at prejudice, and even illegitimate love engenders sympathetic respect in them. The horror and the repulsion they feel for Svengali is all the more striking against the backdrop of this Great Exhibition of modern virtues. It feels as if it has something to do with the rasping friction between two extremes: a superhuman ability and what seems subhuman to the author.